Atlassian has highlighted the public company experience brought by new director, former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem.

Star Australian software group Atlassian has added two Silicon Valley heavyweights to its board. Facebook engineer Jay Parikh and former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem bring its total number of directors to eight.

The appointments add to ongoing speculation about timing of possible US float for Atlassian, which has grown rapidly since its inception in 2002.

“Jay’s experience in building and scaling one of the world’s largest computing platforms is directly relevant to helping us scale Atlassian OnDemand, one of the world’s largest collaborative software development platforms.”

Prior to his current role at Facebook, prominent on Parikh’s resume is his stint as the vice president of engineering at Akamai Technologies, whose distributed computing systems provide points of presence around the globe for many of the world’s top websites.

Facebook’s Jay Parikh brings expertise that will help Atlassian scale up, the company says.

Atlassian president Jay Simons told VentureBeat Salem and Parikh add to what is “a pretty enviable board”. Two directors, Kirk Bowman and Richard Wong, represent Accel Partners, from which Atlassian received its first and thus far only round of funding with a $60 million investment in 2010.

Salem, he says, knows “how to grow a company, how to prioritise, how to recruit and retain talent, and how to scale a corporate culture”.

Making tools that assist software developers to track and collaborate on projects, Atlassian already has plenty of runs on the board, becoming the brightest star in the Australian software development space.